Something surprising happened when we sat down last week to write aboutwhat we wanted to see more ofinGTA 6.
Two of us, independently, wanted to write about radio stations.
I was going to write about Non-Stop-Pop and its host DJ Cara.
(Ed’s piece was so good in the end I found some other bobbins to write about.)
Maybe it’s not surprising that more than one of us wanted to write about the radio.
Radio has been a part of GTA since the very beginning, after all.
You were living with the ghost of their musical taste.
Scroll forward to the present and I can’t imagine GTA without radio.
Radio is its own way of being in this world.
And we’re back to Non-Stop-Pop.
The best tunes, yes, but also the best DJ with that cheery, disarmingly English voice.
I only recently learned that this is Cara Delevigne.
She’s great, but DJ Cara will always be her own entity to me.
We’ve lived with her in our house for the best part of a decade, it feels.
DJ Cara: thank you for your service.
Lots of other open-world games have added radio, of course, but with GTA it hits differently.
The tracklisting feels more considered, the span of stations more emblematic of the terrifying wilds of American broadcasting.
The people you pass in the streets probably know about DJ Cara.
All of my early memories of life in the States include radio.
It’s his own song coming back to him.
He couldn’t be happier.
The music fades and B comes back on.
“That was the new Fleetwood Mac single,” he says.
He takes a beat.
“Yeah, I don’t know about that one.”
